Value of Data debated at the Memery Crystal Tech Breakfast Club

Last week I enjoyed breakfast with the MC Tech Breakfast Club where we debated the value of data and the legal framework for business use of data.

Tim Ryan, the founder and chair of the club, laid out 3 sources of value from data:

Helping with decision making

Allow two interested parties to exchange value

It can have an entertainment value

Generally speaking, Tim felt, “the more important the decision, the more accurate the data has to be”

He then outlined 4 main areas where businesses need to be on the ball when it comes to data:

Data Governance – it should be properly structured, consistent, accurate. You need teams to manage it

Data Security Management– Mitigation of worldwide risks such as risk of loss, risk of corruption and IP theft.

Data Structures – without them we just have “unstructured soup”, in particular, he felt data categorisation is important

Data Integrity – maintaining the cleanliness and soundness of the data

These are 4 important areas for any business to consider when handling data, whether big or small. Certainly Rise provides a structured data processing service, converting unstructured big data (such as social media activity of individual employees) into structured data (a weekly summary score for each employee) and visualisation (often a leaderboard).

There’s a short video of interviews following the event from the participants (including me) where we go into more depth on the data privacy issues for consumers, the need for a US data privacy framework to match the European one and how gamification can be the key that unlocks access to consumer data for businesses.